Reacting to Its Stalled Popularity, Nascar Checked Under the Hood

To review how the sport communicates with fans new and old, Nascar interviewed nearly 40 of its executives and 151 industry stakeholders, including drivers, race teams and sponsors.Credit
Jerry Markland/Getty Images for Nascar

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — When the royalty of Nascar gathered last June in a hotel in Charlotte, N.C., the meeting had the feel of an urgent summit. Once a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, Nascar suffered during the recession as attendance and television ratings fell and sponsors, who once flocked to the sport, held back.

Brian France, Nascar’s chairman, flanked by his top lieutenants, came armed with more than a year’s worth of research on what ailed Nascar and shared it with Roger Penske, Jack Roush and other race team executives. Drivers, the lifeblood of the sport, were too predictable; race teams and Nascar were slow to embrace social media; track owners were not doing enough to make attending races easier; not enough was being done to attract Hispanics and urban youths to offset the decline in older fans.

“Our success covered up or accelerated good and bad things going on,” France said recently. “It’s better to be on the offensive and put a tail wind behind it.”

France’s message was based on the first comprehensive study of Nascar, ordered in 2010 to come up with a five-year plan for fixing the sport. The Nascar Sprint Cup Series opens its 2012 season Sunday with the Daytona 500 after the corporate soul-searching resulted in a set of measures, compiled late last year, aimed at revitalizing the way the sport does business.

After the recession slowed years of meteoric growth, Nascar’s leadership, from France on down, realized that the build-it-and-they-will-come model that propelled it through the 1990s and the first half of the last decade was no longer a solid business strategy. More than most sports, Nascar relies on older, white male fans. The study found that those fans were, because of the recession and their advancing age, going to fewer races and spending less at the races they did attend. According to the research, the growth in the number of single-parent families had also made it harder for fathers and mothers to take their children to races.

Because fans flocked to races for years, Nascar did not have to work hard to find newcomers. Now, younger fans are more likely to learn about a sport online than from a father or uncle, and Nascar feels it has to speak more directly to them.

The car culture that nourished Nascar has also been changing. Fewer Americans are tinkering under the hood, which makes them less likely to appreciate stock cars. Brand loyalty to automobile manufacturers has eroded, undermining another cornerstone of the Nascar fan experience: rooting for a Chevy, a Dodge, a Ford or a Toyota. (The latest racecar design, introduced in 2007 to criticism from drivers and fans alike, did not help. The four manufacturers are designing cars that look more like the models they represent, and they will be on the track next year.)

“There was a lack of understanding about what Nascar was trying to accomplish,” said Steve Phelps, Nascar’s chief marketing officer, who hired Taylor, a communications firm, to conduct the study. “Like any business, you have to take stock of where you are.”

To review how the sport communicates with fans new and old, Nascar interviewed nearly 40 of its executives and 151 industry stakeholders, including drivers, race teams and sponsors. More than 1,000 casual and avid fans completed online surveys. News media coverage of Nascar during the past decade was analyzed to see how it could be improved.

It was a no-holds-barred look at the sport done at breakneck speed. The results were “a real eye-opener,” said Mike Helton, Nascar’s president. The findings showed what many in the sport sensed, but were unable to correct: Nascar spoke in many voices, often at once. Drivers said one thing, race teams said another. Nascar promoted the sport as the organizing body, and the broadcasters and sponsors pumped the races in their own way. Track operators across the country had their own interests to pursue.

“The media landscape has changed so much and we were slow to change to it,” Phelps said. “We need to have a bonfire instead of 10 campfires” if Nascar wants to speak effectively to attract new fans.

After spending more than $5 million on the research, Nascar spent millions more buying back its digital rights in 2013 from Turner, which had paid Nascar a fee to run its Web site. This will help resolve conflicts that have hampered Nascar’s exposure. For instance, a television station currently can shoot video at a track and broadcast it, but it has not been allowed to post the video on its Web site because it competes with Turner’s Web site. That will change next year.

Nascar also hired nine new staff members, in part to help market to Hispanic, urban and young fans. Drivers were also encouraged to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate because, the research showed, fans are more likely to get hooked on the sport if they can root for a specific driver. Sponsors that provide the financial fuel for race teams also want more for their advertising dollars.

“I was fighting against social media because am I going to walk down the street to get a burger and tweet that?” said Jeff Gordon, the four-time Cup Series champion who now has 129,000 followers on Twitter. “But when I met with sponsors, they asked me about my social media. It really got me to look at it more.”

To attract new fans, Phelps commissioned an ethnographic study that gauged how fans navigate racetracks. This included 64 hours with focus groups. At nine tracks, 650 fans were interviewed and 55 hours of video footage shot. More than 70 first-time fans were given tickets and spending money to attend one Nascar race, one other sporting event and one nonsporting event like a concert or circus, and asked to record everything they did.

The video revealed a wealth of details. Some new fans discovered that many things required cash. Few tracks offered services for children. While most tracks did a good job of ushering cars into their parking lots, few of them directed traffic after races ended. Tracks sold tickets in a variety of formats.

“We all fell into a rut because we assumed all fans were professionals,” said Joie Chitwood, the president of Daytona International Speedway. “We didn’t assume there would be some rookies.”

But first and foremost, fans want to follow tight races and fresh faces, two things they got last year. After Jimmie Johnson won five consecutive championships, Tony Stewart edged Carl Edwards for the title in the final race of the season. Not surprisingly, television ratings rose.

“I don’t think it’s good for one driver to win five championships in a row,” said R. Jon Ackley, who teaches a class on the business of Nascar at Virginia Commonwealth University. “That’s why Nascar saw a resurgence last season.”

If nothing else, the research was so comprehensive that executives in the sport who normally talk to one another about cars and track conditions are now swapping ideas on how to work together to better reach fans and sponsors.

“It would be difficult to envision a day when I was happy about someone else’s success on the racetrack,” said Marshall Carlson, the president of Hendrick Motorsports. “There was a real shift in that we started to use the word ‘we’ a lot more.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 24, 2012, on page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Reacting to Its Stalled Popularity, Nascar Checked Under the Hood. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe